


Wildflowers grow through the cracks

by Namixart



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternative Universe: Aerith is in SOLDIER, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Not primarily a romance fic though, Slow Burn, Vignettes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-10
Updated: 2019-03-10
Packaged: 2019-11-14 16:28:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,056
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18056030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Namixart/pseuds/Namixart
Summary: Aerith didn’t remember her mother. She didn’t know her name or anything about her besides the fact that she abandoned her as a child, as Veld said. Some nights she would dream of a warm presence and a kind, if tired, smile, but she never lingered on it. She didn’t think of her mother often. Sephiroth didn’t either, after all. It wasn’t like wondering about missing parents ever worked with Shinra employees.





	Wildflowers grow through the cracks

Aerith didn’t remember her mother. She didn’t know her name or anything about her besides the fact that she abandoned her as a child, as Veld said. Some nights she would dream of a warm presence and a kind, if tired, smile, but she never lingered on it. She didn’t think of her mother often. Sephiroth didn’t either, after all. It wasn’t like wondering about missing parents ever worked with Shinra employees.

One day, when she was ten, Veld brought her to Dr Hollander’s lab for a blood test. The nurse sitting at the front desk was a nervous young man, probably a new hire.

“Name?” he asked.

“Aerith.”

The nurse hesitated for a second, puzzled. “I need your full name.”

Aerith blinked and repeated herself, slowly.

“Don’t you have a last name?” the nurse said, a little irked now.

Aerith furrowed her brows, but before she could speak, Veld cut in: “Next,” he said with a firmness that was usually reserved for misbehaving children. Not that there were many children in Shinra’s headquarters. In fact, it was just Aerith, now that Sephiroth had turned fifteen and was old enough to join SOLDIER and move into the dorms.

The nurse bit his lip and continued his short interview. After that, Veld ushered Aerith into the examination room and closed the door behind him. They stood in silence for a few seconds, until Aerith gathered the courage to speak.

“What’s a last name?” she asked.

“Another word next to your name. Makes it easier to identify people,” Veld answered stiffly, “You don’t have one,” he added after a pause.

“Oh.”

Another moment of silence.

“Do you have one?”

“Once.”

That was the end of that conversation, and Aerith hadn’t seen that nurse since. Veld escorted her to her sterile white room and told her to go to sleep. No good-night, as usual. Just before falling asleep, Aerith briefly wondered if having parents meant having a last name as well.

Sephiroth had similar stories of his own that ended with curious new hires being fired and curious children sent to their room with a scolding glare. No wonder, then, that he never spoke of his mother, even though he at least knew her name. That made two of them, Aerith mused. Two orphans with only one name and no family to speak of.

 

 

Aerith spent most of her childhood in and out of labs, amongst scientists in white coats running test after test while she stared at the ceiling and counted the minutes. Any moment not spent on a medical chair was usually dedicated to reading school books. She liked that a lot better. She especially liked studying geography, even though her books didn’t have pictures of the distant places they spoke of. When Sephiroth made SOLDIER, he started going on missions all over Gaia. That meant they saw each other a lot less often, but every time he came back he made sure to show her pictures he’d taken on his travels. The photos looked small and grainy on Sephiroth’s phone screen, but Aerith loved to imagine the cold of the Northern Continent or the sun in Costa del Sol or the wind around Nibelheim. They spent many a lazy Sunday afternoon in Aerith’s room looking at those pictures as she nursed her sore arms and legs – courtesy of Hojo’s team – and Sephiroth told her about his missions. She liked his stories.

“This,” he said, angling his phone so she could see it, “is Cosmo Canyon. We got there at sunset and the rocks looked like they were on fire. It was so hot they felt like it too.”

Aerith almost reached out to feel the fire as well, but she caught herself. Sephiroth noticed the little movement and sighed deeply. He blew his hair out of his face – it was getting long, but Aerith liked it – and handed her the phone.

“We made camp next to a meadow full of flowers,” he said softly, nodding towards the device.

Aerith gasped and hurriedly looked down to click on the buttons and skip to the next picture in the album. It was a little blurry, but the colours were intact. Purple, yellow and white flowers grew all over the small clearing, beautiful and strong. She shook herself out of her transfixion when she heard a soft chuckle next to her.

“I knew you’d love them.” Sephiroth smiled, gently ruffling her hair. “I wish I could have brought some to you.”

Aerith shook her head. “No, no. Leave them there, so they can grow,” she said seriously.

Sephiroth nodded. “Okay, then I’ll try to bring you there some day. Deal?”

She beamed up at him. “Deal!”

His stories made her think she could stop imagining one day. Maybe the smell of chemicals would turn into scent of wildflowers.

 

 

The lab visits intensified as she grew up. Almost every day Veld brought her to the scientific department and left her there for hours on end. Dr Hojo especially seemed to love every second he spent prodding and injecting and drawing blood from Aerith. Once her period started, he was downright ecstatic, but he was never allowed decisional power over the tests to be run again. Sephiroth was cryptic about it, but Aerith overheard from some sentries passing by that the two of them had had a big screaming match. Apparently Hojo had wanted to perform an experiment on her that Sephiroth _really_ hadn’t liked. It was the only time Aerith had ever heard of him losing his cool.

“Hojo’s sick,” he said darkly when she asked him, “Don’t ever go near him alone.”

Aerith didn’t know what he’d done, but she was grateful for whatever insane test she was spared. It seemed that when Sephiroth was around her visits to the labs were less frequent and less invasive. The higher-ups probably didn’t want to upset their new golden boy, Aerith mused.

Sephiroth, now seventeen and a 1st Class SOLDIER, was dispatched to Wutai for the war shortly after the fight with Hojo, leaving Aerith even more lonely than before. Sometimes, she was allowed to watch the SOLDIER training grounds from a monitoring tower. It wasn’t very fun, but she could see the people below smiling and laughing every once in a while.

“So unfocused,” muttered Veld, ever present at her side.

Below, a 3rd Class helped one of his comrades up after beating him in a sparring session. They bumped fists and shared a laugh before resuming their positions. Aerith followed the small exchange with captive eyes.

Sephiroth never told her much about what he did with SOLDIER. He usually spoke of the places he visited and the people he met, but Aerith knew there was more to it. And Sephiroth didn’t like to talk about it.

As Veld took her back to her books, she couldn’t help but wonder whether those boys knew what was in store for them.

 

 

A month before Aerith’s fifteenth birthday, Hojo had her change into a bathing suit and step into a large empty glass tube. He gave her a once-over before casually ripping out a plaster on her forearm, revealing one of her recent burns. She hissed slightly, then schooled her face into a neutral expression.

“Is this going to take long?” she asked, not even looking at him.

“Three hours,” he answered, stepping behind the console and pushing a few buttons.

“Yay.”

Hojo shot her a dirty look but, to be honest, Aerith was way past worrying about it. The tank started to fill up with green liquid. Aerith gasped and jumped away from it.

“Mako?!” she yelped, “Are you trying to poison me?”

Hojo didn’t look up from his computer. “Not necessarily.”

She glared at him, but she was soon distracted when she felt her feet go cold. Mako was filling up the tank, fast. Aerith sucked in a sharp breath and braced herself for the numbness that would take over her skin in a few minutes.

The liquid stopped just below her collarbone. Her loose hair was floating around her, moved gently by the bubbles in the tank. For a while, the only sounds to be heard were the beeping of the machine hooked to her vitals and her own echoing breaths. Aerith closed her eyes and let out a deep sigh at the thought of how used she’d become to having a needle sticking out of her arm.

Hojo hummed, with the exact intonation that meant: ‘something I wasn’t fully expecting happened and I am intrigued, although you either won’t care or won’t like it’. The beeping of the machine intensified. Aerith glanced at it. Instead of slowing down, her vital functions were slowly but steadily intensifying. She looked down at herself. Her body wasn’t going numb – in fact, she felt more energised than when she’d stepped in, despite the temperature and the fact that she was _supposed_ to get Mako poisoning.

She followed Hojo’s gaze to a spot on her left forearm. To her surprise, she saw that her wound was covered in small green bubbles. When she shook her arm to pop them, the burn underneath was gone.

“Well,” said Hojo, motioning for the lab assistant to come closer, “I think we’ve hit a breakthrough.”

As the assistant scrambled to get his notepad to write observations down, Hojo went back behind the console.

“Let’s see… What if I electrify it?” he mumbled to himself, as he turned a knob.

Again, Aerith braced herself for pain that never came. Hojo cracked what might have passed for a smile and turned to type something on his computer, muttering under his breath the whole time.

That’s how Aerith and, unfortunately, Hojo found out she was immune to Mako poisoning. When Veld came to collect her a few hours later, Aerith snuck a quick glance at her medical file. At the top of it was written a word she’d never seen before: ‘Cetra’. Hojo caught her gaze and snatched the file from the table.

“Mind your business, girl,” he said with a glare.

Aerith turned away and hurried to reach Veld. Kind of sad that her own medical file wasn’t ‘her business’.

 

 

The morning of her fifteenth birthday, Aerith woke up determined not to look at her desk. She got dressed very slowly and she took her sweet time braiding her hair. She stared at her shorter bangs for a second, then grabbed a hairbrush and styled them like Sephiroth’s. For good luck.

Her desk was sitting silently behind her – as desks should – but it seemed to be calling to her, the tension growing heavier by the second.

Finally, she turned, hoping against all odds that she would be wrong. For once in her life, of course, she wasn’t. The SOLDIER 3rd Class uniform was neatly folded next to a helmet and an envelope. With shaky hands, Aerith reached out to the letter.

 

_The Shinra Company is ecstatic to confirm that your application for the SOLDIER program has been accepted. You will begin training with the other new recruits on the 5 th of February, at Training Ground Gamma in Shinra Headquarters. At the end of your first month you will receive further information on your journey with us._

_Good Luck,_

_Director Lazard_

Aerith bit down a dark chuckle. As if there had been any application to accept in the first place. In the envelope there was another note in Veld’s handwriting.

               

_You start today at ten. You will join the other 3 rd Class who just finished their Mako treatment. You will say that you are part of an experimental program and that’s why you weren’t in with them. Do not mention the fact that you grew up in Shinra facilities. If other people ask, you will say that your background is classified information due to the experimental program. Any slip-up will lead to repercussions._

Aerith sighed. She wondered what Sephiroth would have had to say about this. But he was in Wutai, and dropping out of SOLDIER was pretty much impossible even if you weren’t part of an ‘experimental program’. By the time he found out, it would be too late to do anything about it.

She glanced at the clock. Nine-thirty. She sighed again and took the uniform in her hands. Well, no use complaining.

**Author's Note:**

> In which I give myself a headache trying to wrangle the FFVII timeline into something vaguely sensical.  
> For context: Ifalna tried to escape Shinra when Aerith was even younger than in canon, but was killed in the chase. Aerith survived and was raised in Shinra HQ alongside Sephiroth.  
> I have no hope of mantaining a consistent updating schedule, but I'll try not to let too much time elapse between chapters.  
> As always, any comment or review is greatly appreciated and I hope you enjoy ^_^


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